There seems to be some confusion as to whether or not the Identity Appliance that ships as part of vRealize Automation (previously known as vCloud Automation Center, which will be referred to as vCAC 6 for the rest of this article) is required when deploying vCAC 6.1 in conjunction with vSphere 5.5 and later.

As of vSphere 5.1, Single Sign-On (SSO) is a pre-requisite to installing the components for and including vCenter Server. It’s no secret that VMware’s initial implementation of SSO in vSphere 5.1 was terrible. It was over complicated in terms of its implementation requirements, even requiring its own database, to be manually set up using SQL scripts. Thankfully, VMware addressed many if not all of the SSO issues in its release vSphere 5.5, with SSO now being a much more simple and robust component in your vSphere 5.5 environment.

I’ve been thinking about retiring my old home lab server hardware for some time now. I’ve had two little HP ProLiant ML110 G5 servers for 5+ years. They’ve been good little machines and didn’t cost too much to run, but I can now tell that time has taken its toll on them. They each have a dual core Intel Xeon processor and maxed out at 8GB of RAM. With the management components of products such as vSphere, vCAC, vCD, etc. nowadays requiring at least 8GB per appliance, these machines have basically been made obsolete by the requirements of most enterprise applications today.

I am happy to announce that our new book, VMware vSphere Performance (ISBN: 9781118008195) is now available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in eBook format on Kindle as well as Paperback. The Paperback version should be in stock at Amazon.com by 12 May 2014.

This title was first announced in 2011 and due to a number of issues and difficulties, the book was delayed several times. However, due to the hard work and dedication of my co-authors, Matt Liebowitz, Christopher Kusek and the editorial team at John Wiley & Sons, Inc. we were able to finally bring the title to print.

On the 20th of February 2014, I published some of my PowerCLI scripts to GitHub in an attempt to have some sort of version control system in place as well as to make the scripts available to the general public. However, my current role doesn't really require that much scripting, and it really is only the occasional script that I have to put together. Therefore, I've only learned a little of PowerShell, basically enough to get the job done. I come from a C/C++ programming background and feel much more comfortable when working on a file with a .c, .cpp or a .h file extension.

I remember struggling to get my head around Apache Webserver file permissions. It's a common issue, and I've seen forum posts this weekend with users struggling to get it right. That s what's prompted this post.

I've always wanted to find a cost effective way to implement 2-factor authentication. Commercial solutions are expensive, and if you are a small business, you might not want to spend a small fortune on implementing an enterprise solution with hardware tokens. I stumbled across Google Authenticator a while back and started to wonder how it can be used to implement a free 2-factor authentication solution in my lab. I also found a few posts that suggested teaming it up with Freeradius and that's really where this post started.